General Consultant Discussion

Has anyone who is offering support plans to their customer base developed any type of policy around FRX. I'm finding increasingly that reinstallation, configuration and debugging is time consuming as people swap workstations, virtual environments, etc. Do you have a fixed fee for each assist, or add an additional amount to your annual plan?

Wayne, we haven't addressed it yet but we do require customers to stay current on support with Sage. Since FRx is no longer covered by support at Sage and the product has been retired, I think it is reasonable to inform you customers that FRx is no longer covered under your standard support plan as of X date. Then issue one-off charges for supporting it. At some point in time, you are going to have to offer an alternative and give your customers an incentive to change. The publisher doesn't support it, the OEM partner doesn't support it. Why are you trying to hang on?

If my last paragraph sound harsh, it wasn't meant to be. I just find myself trying to be the white knight in too many situations. It's not my fault the product was retired. I need to stop feeling responsible for my customer having to change.

Shawn - +1 - agree with you all the way. As to the question of why hang on - the main reason is that some customers paid $10k - $15k for the reports to be created and I know my fear is that once I get them into a replacement (let's assume $5k of licensing) and another $5k? of services --- then I have the invariable ""well it doesn't do what FRX does ..... and FRX was still working"" ... But yes --- agree. Maybe this makes a good MOTM session - more form the angle of best approach business wise to get customers to convert.

Thinking out loud - for $1,500 additional I'd probably be ok with continuing to support FRX each year if the customer wanted. I find that the issues break out to two main areas: 1. Install new workstations/server replacements 2. Something suddenly ""breaks"" In both cases the time required to get the system working can be material and requires some fairly specific knowledge. BTW - I'm leaning toward Biznet as a replacement largely because (assuming the products are relatively equal - which I think they are) -- Biznet skills don't lock me into the Sage ecosystem. I do struggle with the ""oh but we have a free license and the SI self-installed"" issue....

Couple things: 1) on workstation installs / server migrations, do you include that in your service agreement? How do you cap it? I guess to be honest, if someone is deploying a new workstation, we will just pop in and help. It's easier than dealing with a bad install after the fact. For a server migration, we typically charge $1,000 + depending upon what all is involved. Too much to do with security setting, anti-virus, jacking with the IT guys, integrations, etc. 2) I still like BizNet but the installation process is still a lot more convoluted that it should be. It sure works nice afterwards but don't confuse it with FRx. FRx did some really nice things that take some work in BizNet. Nothing is ever simple. ;-(

I handle the workstations similarly - usually if it's straightforward and one user and I can talk them through wksetup there's no charge. If it's in conjunction with a server move and I also have to manage the server move - typically in the $1,000 to $1,200 range. Not to oversimplify the art of pricing but I've found that $400, $800, $1200 is about my range for small / medium / large ""quick"" requests. It makes quoting a lot simpler. I won't price anything less than $400 -- and ""quick question"" type assistance I've found to be within the range above. More complex projects I take the time to work through a more detailed plan

Thanks for the pricing on small requests. We round by 500 for reports. 500, 1000, 1500 for a simple, medium, or moderate report. A lot of complexity on layout or formating, more the 3 tables in the join, or processing of data prior to reporting and the quote is done on a one-off basis. Same kind of thing.

Fixed Fee of $500 for workstation install with no guarantees. In two Win7 cases, we can get FRx to work but not export to XLS file. Of course, they use this feature extensively. We duplicated their installation locally and it works just fine. We are recommending Renovofyi because of the shorter learning curve, similarity to FRx, and they convert reports for a nominal fee.